Shaming Redux (was Re: [Fwd: Culture and Technology (was Re: Abortion, Killing etc)]

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

Katha:
>  But yes, you're right. If something is conceived of as having a moral
>dimension other people do scrutinize and comment.  i see no solution for
>this -- why should abortion be different than the other things people
>do, that friends and strangers feel able to judge and criticize? the
>crucial thing is that the woman gets to decide, not the kibitzers. It's
>like lots of people might disapprove of a love affair, or a divorce --
>they might even be right! -- but they shouldn't get to force others to
>be faithful, or stay married. People are really judgmental, you can't
>change that.

Well, I thought you were _rightfully incensed_ at Andy's remarks upon
casual drinking, pregnancy, & the need for tough-love communitarian
shaming, especially his references to your personal experience.

>  I know someone who had five abortions in her twenties (now she's the
>mother of teen twins). I never breathed a word to her of course -- and
>of course i think it was better for her to abort than bear kids she
>didn't want.  But I felt what she was doing was childish and
>self-destructive and basically all about proving she wasn't a good
>little  middle-class suburban girl, acting out some struggle with her
>parents (the five abortions weren't the only example of this ). I didn't
>think the five abortions were killing, much less murder-- but they
>creeped me out. but if abortion is just nothing, then why not use it as
>your method of birth control, as she basically did? It just seemed to me
>there was a big disregard there. I have another friend, though, who had
>three abortions, despite much birth controlling. And that seemed
>different. Not that either of these women should care what i think! But
>I can't help thinking.

It's good that you kept your judgment to yourself; alas, many people do not
possess the same modesty and self-restraint.  One of the consistent
anti-abortionist rhetorics has been to represent women as victims of
abortions & their own self-destructive ways and to argue that abortions
have negative health and psychological effects upon women.  I understand
your feelings about your friend (and I would also feel protective toward
her and might even suggest that she kick out guys who are condom-averse if
I were a friend of a woman like her), but we can't afford to express such
feelings in public.  Besides, women who have five abortions got to be a
very, very tiny minority (and like the proverbial welfare moms who have
five, six, seven kids, maybe they hardly exist).

*****  APA News Release

Date: January 31, 1997
Contact: Doug Fizel
Public Affairs Office
Phone: (202) 336-5700
Email: public.affairs@xxxxxxx


Data From Long-Term Study Demonstrate That Even Highly Religious Women are
not at Significantly Greater Risk of Psychological Distress Because They
Had an Abortion

Even for Devout Catholic Women, The Best Predictor of Well-Being After
Abortion is the Woman's Well-Being Before Abortion

WASHINGTON -- Social scientists have known for years that the availability
of legal abortion is not associated with long-term psychological distress
in women who use it. An eight-year longitudinal study involving nearly
5,300 young women published in 1992 found that the best predictor of
well-being in women over the course of the study was their well-being at
the start of the study, not their income level, job status, level of
education or martial status or -- quite specifically -- whether they had
had an abortion. Now a new follow-up study, published in the current
edition of the American Psychological Association's (APA) journal
Professional Psychology: Research and Practice finds that the same
conclusion still applies regardless of religious or racial differences.

The study, by psychologists Nancy Felipe Russo, Ph.D., of Arizona State
University and Amy J. Dabul, Ph.D., of Phoenix College, is further analysis
of data gathered from a national sample of 5,295 women aged 14 to 24 (in
1979) who were interviewed annually from 1979 to 1987. The women's
well-being was assessed using a reliable and valid measure of self-esteem
in 1980 and again in 1987. This time, in addition to looking at variables
such as income, employment and education, the researchers looked at race
and religious beliefs and practices to see if they had any effect on
women's well-being after having had an abortion.

They found that, overall, White women and Black women did not differ
statistically on measures of self-esteem. Approximately the same proportion
of Black women and White women reported having had an abortion (14.6% and
14.9% respectively), but Black women had more abortions than White women
and Black women who had abortions were more likely than White women to be
mothers (86% vs 57%). Nonetheless, having had an abortion (or more than
one) had no relation with self-esteem in either group: 'For both Black
women and White women, prior self-esteem was the biggest predictor of
subsequent self-esteem,' the authors note. The same held true when they
compared Black and White women who reported a religious affiliation and
high or low church attendance with those who were not religious.

Since the type of religion to which women who had an abortion belonged also
did not make a difference in their post-abortion well-being, the
researchers focused specifically on Catholic versus non-Catholic women,
given that the Catholic Church 'has a consistent antiabortion position that
is vigorously promoted.'

Their findings in this analysis were more complex: non- Catholic women who
had high church attendance and one abortion had the highest self-esteem;
non-Catholic women who had low church attendance and repeat abortions had
the lowest self-esteem. But at the same time, high-church-attendance
non-Catholic women with one abortion had significantly higher self-esteem
than did low-church- attendance Catholic women with no abortions. 'Although
highly religious Catholic women were slightly more likely to exhibit
postabortion psychological distress than other women,' the researchers say,
'this fact is explained by lower pre-existing well-being.'

Given these findings, the researchers ask: 'Do highly distressed women who
have had an abortion exist?' And, they answer: 'Yes. But their distress is
likely to be rooted in events and conditions that existed before they
became pregnant. Legal abortion per se does not increase a woman's risk of
negative well- being.'

Article: 'The Relationship of Abortion to Well-Being: Do Race and Religion
Make a Difference?' by Nancy Felipe Russo, Ph.D., Arizona State University,
and Amy J. Dabul, Ph.D., Phoenix College, in Professional Psychology:
Research and Practice, Vol. 28, No. 1.

                     (Full texts available from the APA Public Affairs
Office.)

The American Psychological Association (APA), in Washington, DC, is the
largest scientific and professional organization representing psychology in
the United States and is the world's largest association of psychologists.
APA's membership includes more than 142,000 researchers, educators,
clinicians, consultants and students. Through its divisions in 49 subfields
of psychology and affiliations with 58 state, territorial and Canadian
provincial
associations, APA works to advance psychology as a science, as a profession
and as a means of promoting human welfare.   *****

One would expect a higher level of psychological distress after an abortion
if _an abortion at any stage under any circumstances_ were indeed a
distressing and complicated moral choice that many present it to be.  I
know that even some leftist women are given to emphasizing the "moral
complexity and weight" of an abortion, but I think that's their "impression
management" (much like the American overreporting of church attendance),
since we all know that to treat abortion as a simple medical procedure
invites an attack upon those who say so as immoral, callous, selfish, etc.
Maybe Andy was right at least in the sense that shaming really works, but I
think that moralism is cruel and tragic, unnecessary and undesirable, not
to mention self-defeating.

For my part, I think that the actually existing mixed feelings and
complexities come from _the circumstances that surround abortions_ --
financial burdens, religious moralism, glorification of motherhood, bad
relationships with male partners, harassment by clinic protesters, etc. --
not from abortions themselves.

Yoshie